An Experimental Study Of Teaching English Pragmatic Competence For Senior High School Students Under The Guidance Of Usage-Based Theory

Pragmatic competence is an important part of communicative competence,which has been regarded as a great challenge to second language learners.Even English learners with high levels often fail to express themselves appropriately in daily life.Most of the previous researches on pragmatic competence teaching separate pragmatic knowledge and semantic knowledge strictly,but usage-based theory considers this to be problematic.The usage-based theory claims that there is no strict distinction between semantic knowledge and pragmatic knowledge.Knowledge about the meaning of words and how to use words are both types of semantic knowledge.In addition,most of the subjects in previous studies are college students,and the researches on the teaching of English pragmatic competence for senior high school students are rarely involved.Besides,there are still some problems in teaching English pragmatic competence to high school students.Based on the above situations,this thesis explores the teaching effects on senior high school students’ English pragmatic comprehension and English pragmatic expression competence under the guidance of usage-based theory,and tries to answer the following two questions: 1)What effect does the teaching under the guidance of usage-based theory have on senior high school students’ English pragmatic comprehension competence? 2)What effect does the teaching under the guidance of usage-based theory have on senior high school students’ English pragmatic expression competence?This study is an experimental study,which takes 91 high school students in two parallel classes of grade one of a senior high school in Heyuan City as the subjects.The experimental intervention is carried out for eleven weeks.These two classes have the same level of English pragmatic competence,and they are distinguished from the experimental class and the control class.The control class adopts the traditional teaching method-PPP Model(Present-Practice-Production),while the experimental class adopts the teaching method under the guidance of usage-based theory.The research instruments of this study are questionnaire and Discourse Completion Tasks.Besides,SPSS 24.0 is used to analyze the results of the experimental class and control class respectively.By analyzing the data collected from the questionnaire,pre-test,immediate post-test and delayed post-test,there is a general understanding of the present situation of English pragmatic competence of the subjects and the following conclusions are drawn: Compared with the traditional teaching method,usage-based theory can effectively facilitate senior high school students’ English pragmatic comprehension competence and pragmatic expression competence,and the experimental class students can express their intentions more appropriately when communicating with others in English.There are several pedagogical implications for the teaching of English pragmatic competence.First of all,teachers should pay more attention to the language use in the teaching of English pragmatic competence,allowing students to learn the language in authentic situations.Secondly,teachers should provide students with a large number of specific exemplars and high-frequency input,so that these exemplars are entrenched in learners’ minds for the schematization.Finally,when teaching English pragmatic competence,pragmatic knowledge and semantic knowledge should not be separated strictly.